1st June 2009, starting an adventure

Hello World,

How is everyone out there? I am feeling full of beans today and I always seem to have such a lot to say. Which is also because I have such a complicated Life but it has resulted in such a reward that I can do no less than thank God or the Universe for all that has happened to me, as at the end of it all it has been worth all the effort and all the tears. And in fact all one can write about, fundamentally is about Life itself because everything that we do both exciting and boring, is Life, with a capital L, as you can see. We should probably always live in capital letters, boldly and in eternal proclamation. Presumpteously even. Always presuming that Life will be good. I have discovered that disconcolancy and pessimism gets one nowhere and we all have somewhere to go to. How much better for us when we are happy, bright and optimistic. Why can't we all look for our rainbow because it is out there. I looked for mine and I found it, how about you? Haven't you found it.....or haven't you looked? So, come on World, open your eyes, tune your senses to your heartbeat, dance a merry jig, love yourself for a change and you may even find that you can love others too.
Today is a bit of a presentation and as age, sex, profession and hobbies seem a bit trite, if not boring up to the eyeballs here goes for a taste of what my Words are all about : good luck!!!

Fear, Courage, Love and Joy

Life is such a funny business.
The word life itself has so many different connotations.
Life is the world as a whole, life is nature, life is our heartbeat, life is our sorrows, life is our joys.
Life is, or should be, as easy as the air that we breath in and out of our lungs. And yet life can be as difficult and as impossible as trying to walk on that same air.

Take people for instance. For some, life IS as easy at it should be. Is it a question of character, of circumstance, of intelligence maybe? Or is it destiny? Fate?
For some, life is a perpetual obstacle course over which they stumble, fall, rise up and try again, time and time again. An exhausting existence. And yet those same obstacles can come up in the lives of those whose living is easy and flows as naturally as a river runs from its source to the sea. That same obstacle is crossed with the same effort as an athlete leaps over a hurdle, while others, like myself for instance, came to a halt even before reaching it and could not even begin to imagine how to simply start lifting that foot from the ground.

I have swum against the current of life for most of mine. Everything has been difficult for me, and, now that I have finally begun to understand something of the significance of what the living of a life ought to be like, I start to face up to the fact that in my particular case, all my problems and my sorrows have been of my own making. This in itself is not an easy toad to swallow but like many other human beings, owning up to ones own faults and frailties takes a courage of its own. It was much simpler to convince myself that all that went wrong in my life derived from something or someone else. Or that I was unable to change a situation because of x, y and z reasons. I had knotted myself into an intricate mess and remained trapped inside. Or another analogy that I have often declared to others was that I found myself in front of a an endlessly long and endlessly high stone wall that for years I had sat in front of in impotent resignation. But when I realised that all it had taken to get through that solid, unmovable barrier was a simple knock which had opened a door that had always been there only I had never been able to see it, I remember feeling weak with relief...or was it disbelief? All it took for me to open a door to the other side of my problem was to grab a handful of courage, take a deep breath and talk. It doesn't seem like much does it? And yet, our lives are not about inanimate things but about people and relationships. Our difficulties and hardships are often due to the lack of the means with which to communicate, to the fact that harmony and understanding are not always possible between human beings and, as in my case, an ingrained dread of hurting someone else. And an unhealthy tendency to prefer to suffer myself in the cause of others happiness and serenity. Martyrdom, may I assure you, is no fun at all and above all does not receive the appreciation one would think. This realisation was also a step that led me towards understanding what was and what was not important in life.

I always needed to be liked by everyone and thank goodness that I have kicked that need out of the window. I also desired approval from all and sundry and basically lived my life according to other peoples doctrines. This was since I was a child. A very good child. I almost wish that I had been a bit of a rebel, it would probably have resulted in less heartache as an adult. But we cannot reason along the lines of ifs and buts, our life is one only and we have to make the best of it. That isn't to say that we don't make mistakes. We all do. But what makes a difference is how we face up to them.

I made a huge blunder when I got married, one of epic proportions. I married a very good young man, hard working and honest and, at the time, my best friend. Which was the whole point of the subsequent disaster of our marriage .Our relationship should have remained a lifelong friendship and instead I confused that friendship with love, which just goes to show, as I said before, how much I knew about the facts of life. Not an awful lot of knowledge about the birds and the bees and an almost childlike approach to adulthood. Considering that I was always considered a mature teenager I find that the extent of my immaturity was actually quite frightening. In order to compensate our lack of coniugal complicity we had not one, but two children. We thrust ourselves into the busy vortex of family domesticity and I think that for a certain period, we may have been quietly content. But an ill assorted pair cannot continue to live side by side. The law of nature, in my opinion, forbids it, and our body, mind and soul eventually wants out. There came a moment when I had to find my own means of survival in order to be able to continue to present at least the external trappings of a marriage. My children were paramount and it is only in time that I came to see that to seek my happiness in them, and them only, would have been detrimental not only to myself but to them too. They would have had to be my crutches, and should they not have accepted this millstone around their neck, as well as they should have not, I dread to think what repercussions that could have had upon me. We must encourage our children to be free to choose the life they wish to lead, not tie them to apron strings and clip their wings. We must be an example for them to follow, we must always emanate strength and confidence and a great delight in life. Never must we appear as victims….or fools.

For many years I lived totally absorbed by my own unhappy circumstances, unable to see a way out without hurting all those around me. I was enveloped in a tightly laced straight jacket from which I was unable to wiggle even my little finger. Oh yes, I made the best of it. I did all that I could to present and provide a happy, relaxed atmosphere in the home and among my loved ones. I had always promised myself that my misery was mine alone and that others should not be made to suffer for it....hence my penchant for martyrdom! My only saving grace in all those years was the fact that I could talk to my dear friends about the situation and it really is true when they say that a problem shared is a problem halved. Nothing is quite so bad once it is out in the open. Sometimes I received comfort, sometimes an outside opinion which is always positive, even a rap on the knuckles now and again and always, at the end of a good chat that feeling of warmth generated by the knowledge that someone dear to me in any case kept me with them in their thoughts. Whoever finds a true friend has actually found a treasure trove, believe you me.

But the solving of my intricate and seemingly unsolvable problem came when I realised (better late than never) that courage is not, not being afraid, it is proceeding notwithstanding the fear and understanding, after having faced the music, that I had created some sort of monstrous creature from my fear, something far worse than what I actually had had to face. It made me see myself from without and see that if I only took the effort to see how insignificant my ordinary life was, compared to the enormity of humanity and its weight of suffering how could I have wasted time and energy just concentrating on how unhappy and frustrated I was? How could I have not seen it before? How could my own infinitesimal actions have any bearing upon the world? I felt very small, very selfish and very stupid too, if I have to be honest. When I started to wake up to what is and what is not of great relevance at the end of the day, I began to wonder at how I could have ever endured all the past years.

I have changed profoundly and times of change are never easy. There are harsh moments in life and unfortunately we can't do anything about that. What we can do is always put things into the right perspective, bearing in mind that not all people's perspective coincide.
Therefore, it is not possible to avoid conflict. And this fact is one that I have had to come to terms with as I have tried to avoid it all my life. Conflict comes in all shapes and sizes, we have conflict in the form of wars, genocides, family feuds, political disputes, you name it, it'll be there. Conflicts can stem from hate, from money and from love too. There is loud, bombastic, publicised conflict and silent, self-effacing, private conflict. That is why there is a moment for everything in life, even the moment of conflict, be it a difference of opinion, disappointment, anger or pride. But in order for us to go forward, if there has to be conflict, let it come, get it over with and then be able to carry on, forging ahead on this wonderful path that is our life. There is always the sunshine after the rain, sometimes resulting with the most brilliant and inspiring rainbow. But we have to be able to see that this is the way life goes on, to always go through our days thinking of the good times which will in turn help us get through the bad. We have to strive to live the good in our lives and cross the bad times as quickly as possible, get them over and done with in order to return to joy and happiness.

Which is what life is all about anyway. Without joy and happiness life would not be worth living and that too is another message that I have finally capted and understood. Being unhappy has no sense, to ourselves and to others. Being unhappy is tiring, bogs us down in self pity, and it is like being in quicksand, it sucks us in and paralyses us. Happiness instead is like moving around with a pair of springs beneath our feet. It gives us energy to face everyday with a smile, with equanimity and with confidence. It is also, by the way, extremely contagious and I find that there is nothing better that a human being can do than make another person happy. And the more people the better.

Of course, the major emotion that triggers off happiness is love. And of love I could write reams and reams and possibly never stop. What would we all do without love? How can any of us survive without love? Once we have it, how on earth can we ever let it go?
Love has many facets. The first of which is no doubt the love between a man and a woman. All other loves descend from that one. I have to admit that a major component of this progenitor of love is trust. And trust nowadays is not easy to come by. But, if you are lucky enough to stumble across this component, love emanates such joy that it spreads and permeates into every single thing that we do, at least, it does for me. The phrase "my heart almost feels as though it will burst with the love inside" is quite true. I love so much that sometimes it almost hurts inside. And when I feel all that love boiling around inside me I feel that it is coming out from my pores and it makes me want to share it with the others in my world. There is so much of it that I feel as though it is selfish not to. Loving, like life itself, once you know how to do it, is so simple. When difficult situations crop up, it is always because we have decided to mess things up. Because we stop swimming with the flow and don't focus on what we have but rather on what we haven't. Bad mistake that.

Of course, in any relationship, we are talking about more than one person and therefore the element of compromise is not only necessary, but fundamental. Although I sincerely believe that in order to love others, we must also love ourselves, love is a shared sentiment.
And love is always projected to the other, it should be anyway, as what is given will always be returned. Love is an act of giving and receiving which frees subsequent emotions such as the desire to cherish, nurture, protect and elevate the object of our love. Let us also remember that we are not perfect, heaven forbid! Not one single one of us. And with this knowledge let's not be too punctilious, lets not split hairs and let us talk. The greatest defect that mankind has this day and age is its incapacity to communicate face to face. We probably don't know how to talk anymore, full stop. Couples are no longer able to express their feelings, we have forgotten how important words are. Instead of clearing passing clouds as soon as they peek over the horizon, they are allowed to build up. The importance of the simple joy of togetherness has been swamped by all the material things that are now done nowadays. Couples no longer remember that they were ever in love, if ever they were. The same with our children, although thankfully, I can personally say that though I made a mess of my private life, I have made a great success of my sons due primarily to the fact that I have always talked extensively to them, and maybe to the fact that I am one of the few modern women of today who have had the possibility of having reared them for every day of their childhood. Being a full time mother can at times be extremely boring, and can have negative consequences regarding how she has to eventually confront the real world outside the hearth and home. But it does reap a priceless reward. I know my children, they don't even have to speak in order for me to know that there is something wrong. There is no topic that is out of bounds, anything can be discussed and if they have a problem they know that they can come to me. Children need security and strong, confident parents that will imbibe them with strength and confidence too.

Being strong can be very hard to do. Again, we are not all alike. Some people just are strong, others are weak and others, like myself have to drag their strength and courage up from the soles of their feet with tremendous physical and emotional effort. I used to think that my strength lay in my endurance, at how good I was at keeping up an act in order to maintain a status quo and keep my sons and family serene. Well, my endurance cost me a frozen shoulder and pain as I had never experienced before. I really touched the bottom of the barrel or perhaps was it an abyss? The only good thing about touching rock bottom is that there is only one direction to go from there, and that is back up. And that is what happened to me. I made a conscious decision to be happy. I was tired of being miserable and tired and desperate. Everything that I was unable to express had come out through my shoulder and finally I listened and started to live. Very slowly to be sure, but as surely as a house is built brick by brick I, day by day, determined to get myself out of a rut that I had cut further and further into the ground myself by a mixture of fear, cowardice and basic immaturity. Growing up for me has always been a hard business, I grew up very late and for having always been a very mature, responsible child and teenager I really managed to mess up my life. One of my excuses is that I have always been responsible for others and never for myself, but if I have to be honest, I just wasn't capable of making the right decisions and I certainly did not really know what I wanted from my life. I sort of drifted along with a vague rather, childish vision of what my life would be. This cost me my happiness for about 20 years and unfortunately the life of others too. We do not live alone in this world of ours and all our actions have consequences on those around us. Having said that, I was not alone in my world and others too made their own mistakes, their own wrong decisions. But I took the brunt of the responsibility, avoided confrontation, suffered in silence and dropped into a black hole.

I suppose that having made it out is quite an achievement and in the achieving I have hurt all those people that I wanted to protect for all those years. Conclusion? At my ripe age, I have discovered that my actions have not been of cataclysmic destruction, and that after having finally acted and made my great decisions the world is still revolving around the sun, the sky is still blue and life does go on as usual. I, like thousands of other people have lived in a grey limbo land. But then, necessarily, there are no absolutes. If there were we would all have to see life in exactly the same fashion like an army of clones and so having a different opinion of the world than my neighbour is not a sin, and when conflict is necessary it is not the end of the world. I have to admit that going forward in life is easiest when I am convinced of my actions, which is exactly how I have proceeded since my "decision" to be happy. Nothing will make me budge from the idea that each and every one of us subconsciously knows when we do right and wrong. When we do right, even the most difficult and unpleasant circumstance can be faced with a fairly easy heart, we just have to brace ourselves against the impact, whereas when we do wrong, our gut feeling tells us it is so and if we continue it is because we do not wish to acknowledge this unpalatable fact or we do not have the courage to do what is right. Sometimes doing something right is harder than continuing to do something wrong. I tell you, I have learned much in this complicated life of mine, but my tests and trials have led me to have such an appreciation and respect for the lives that populate this planet of ours, of the striving to live in dignity, honesty, respect and mutual love. To this end we should all strive and I would like all of us to face our lives head on, to get rid of our secrets, regrets and envy and accept that we all have to find our own happiness. In order to do that we may have, like myself, to encounter a few rough moments, suffer some sacrifice at times, but if we follow the light at the end of our tunnel, and each one of us has our own personalised light, feel that our goal is right and good for us without damaging too much those around us then let us live this one opportunity we have to walk the earth and live it to the full. There is no sin in wanting to be happy as happiness shines forth like a beacon to those that live in darkness and can only generate happiness in those around us, and I think that happiness makes us better persons, and one better person is what this world of ours needs each and every day.

Fear, for me is best described as paralysis. Are not animals paralysed when caught in the glare of headlights on a road? That is a physical paralysis in the face of imminent, bodily danger. There is also a paralysis of the mind and soul. When fear cannot be overcome it turns into some sort of cannibal, it feeds upon itself and grows and grows until it engulfs us completely and prevents us from being able to use our brains, our good sense. We are unable to see things as they really are and when the cause of our fear makes a move, or we ourselves set off an expected reaction, I can assure you that our fear really does knaw at our entrails, making us feel nauseous, that faces do blench as the blood drains from it making us feel light headed and faint. It is an appalling sensation, and when you live, as I did, in the constant fear that my “real identity” would be discovered and that I would be accused of being an imposter, you can imagine what a weight I was carrying around. Of course, in a way, I was that imposter. In order to play a role that would answer to everyone’s exigencies I had to develop certain traits and suffocate others. My behaviour had to result the same all round. That way no difference could be discerned between how I acted socially as opposed with how I acted more closer to home. In this way, a certain image of me emerged and it was an image that hurt me profoundly. And I began to resent that the real me, a much warmer and affectionate me, was not allowed to emerge. It is only when I began to live a tiny, fragmental life of my own, and built up a miniscule social circle of my own friends that my real personality could finally come out into the open. I could start to joke, allude to sex, confide, give an opinion regarding somebody else’s delicate situation seeing as I had some experience of my own to share or give warning. And slowly, slowly my beginning to be who I really was began to reflect in my home life too. It was inevitable. And probably not appreciated by those around me who preferred that my old, self contained self and controlled situation would perpetuate into eternity. And when we allow ourselves to show our true colours, we become automatically stronger, better able to face others and the world. Because we see how others have reacted to the real us, more often than not in a positive fashion. And consequently, we begin to like ourselves more than we ever did before. Liking ourselves gives us more self confidence on one side and perhaps less tolerant on the other. We become more impatient with other peoples failings and, as we proceed on our long and often difficult journey towards gaining our identity and defeating our fear we begin to ask ourselves why the others don’t do the same thing. There is such satisfaction in expressing our personality to the full and if it is a fundamentally expansive one we want to reach out and stretch to those around us whereas, if we deny ourselves we tend to clench ourselves up in a tight, hermetic ball which is of no use at all to those around us and very damaging both bodily and spiritually to ourselves. Which brings us back to courage. Courage is not only facing a lion in its den or a soldier facing the enemy across a battlefield. Courage is getting up every morning and facing the day to come. Courage is getting your priorities right and stopping after having taken a wrong turn. Courage is doing the right thing even at the cost of hurting someone. If you don’t do the right thing that person will get hurt anyway further along the way, and hurt even harder. Courage is literally taking a deep breath, slapping your cheeks, muttering encouragement to yourself and getting through the unpleasantness that must be faced. It can be terrifying or anguishing but the relief once it is over is not quantifiable. And the sensation of that weight off your shoulders can make you giddy. And the pride you feel in yourself can be the first step to becoming more courageous in the future and as you gain confidence and courage you actually find that you need less courage as you go along. As in all things, the first step is always the hardest.


There is a saying that love can arrive in mysterious ways, well, that is very true. Love can creep un on you unawares or blind you in an instant. I have experienced both, with the same man. I fell in love, slowly but surely, with a man living on the other side of the world through our letters, or to be precise for this day and age, our emails, our having connected, a completely random and accidental event (or so I thought, I later found out that he had been looking for me all of his life, as we had met fleetingly more than 20 years ago). Only I didn't realise that I had fallen hook, line and sinker for the man until a midnight phone call transformed a rather sweet flirtation into a seething cauldron of flaming, incandescent and burning emotions. The most gorgeous, sexy voice uttering sweet nothings reduced me to a mass of collapsed muscle and scrambled brains. And I had never met him. I must be potty I told myself. And yet, against all the odds this love has flourished and has become reality. And Real love, what is that? When you get it you just know. Your mind knows it, your heart knows it, your soul know it and your body knows it. It is such a simple thing really. It is finding “home” within another person, home in his personality, home in his body. Where nothing else matters except being with that person. Which doesn’t mean that the love is going to eliminate all of life’s problems and its nastiness only that facing them will be easier when hand in hand with the one you love. Loving makes life easier and when you love and see how it is, you wonder why the rest of the world cannot see it and make life easier for itself too. How much of life we waste without love. How much more we have to give when we love, how love is self generating, the more we love the more we are loved. Of how we mustn’t be scared to love as love is the greatest natural phenomena in the Universe. If only love could be like a huge meteorite that hits the planet, rocking it off its axis, invading it, conquering it, pacifying it………..utopia, I know, but at least let us strive for it, strive for something better, strive for the best why not, and stop striving for misery, depression and destruction. Why is it human beings always choose the hard way and never see the easy way? We have an ingrained knack of wanting the worst, it must be some perverse, genetic defect that we have as a species. And yet, and yet, a few of us are granted grace and I am one of those few and never will I forget to say thank you, never will I not be grateful for having been given a second chance in this wonderful entity that is Life. My life, unique and precious.

And the greatest consequence of this love is the joy. Love has to bring joy otherwise it isn’t pure. Living joyfully is actually what life is all about. Love is mostly about giving and the receiving is its boomerang effect. Because you can’t give expecting to receive. There is no joy or satisfaction in that. The giving and receiving of love is so powerful that this joy pours into you, out of you and radiates all around you. You can even give out joy and not realise it, not know that your smile, your attitude, your words can have such a powerful effect on those around you. Let us not be jealous of our joy. It takes so little to give a tiny piece of happiness, sometimes to someone that you don’t even know. Joy is contagious, so why not diffuse this disease into the air we breath, into our drinking water, into our food, into our relationships with those who inhabit this world with us? Let our joy be a font of joy to others. Let us declare it and show those who haven’t found it yet that it exists. Let us live our lives to the full, thinking of our good luck, thinking always of those less fortunate and then, when least we expect it our love and our joy will knock on our door. All you have to do is recognize your love and your joy and then never let them go. And once you have them go out into this wide, wide, world of ours and give your infinitesimal drop in the ocean, your drop of love and joy as witness to the beauty of Life.

Have a nice day World.
Helene